Dr. Malmgren is an economist who makes sense of the world economy by writing books, by founding tech businesses, by advising policymakers around the world and through public speaking and teaching. She lectures at Sandhurst and in the Duke Fuqua Global Executive MBA Program. She is a Senior Advisor to The Monaco Foundry, a European start-up incubator for impact-led founders. She is a member of the Advisory Board at Streamline Media, the firm that built many of the most successful video, digital and VR games in modern history. She has been named a Fellow of The Bertelsmann Stiftung Foundation for 2022-2024. She is also a Founder member of the Lunar University, a NASA-originated project to ensure the first human institution on the moon represents the arts and humanities.
She writes a column about the world economy on Substack and is currently pursuing the MIT New Space Economy Program: Technologies, Products, Services, and Business Models. She served President George W. Bush in the White House as Special Assistant to the President and on The National Economic Council. She served on the President’s Working Group on Corporate Governance and The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.
After 9/11 she was also responsible for assessing Terrorism Risks to the Economy and technology as a source of geopolitical competitiveness. Before joining the White House, she ran the Bankers Trust Asset Management business in Asia and was then appointed as the Global Chief Currency Strategist. She was then named the Deputy Head of Global Strategy at UBS. More recently she advised the British Cabinet on trade issues as a Board Member for The Department for International Trade from 2017-2019.
She is also on the Board of Premios Verdes which holds the “Green Oscars” to support cleantech start-ups in emerging markets and serves as a judge on The Queen’s Enterprise Business Awards and is a Senior Associate Fellow of RUSI, the world’s leading defence think tank. She has also been involved in the Planning Committee of the BSA Huxley Summit. In 2014, she co-founded a robotics firm that made industrial drones which won the Cog X Award for Autonomy, the 2020 National Technology Award and Power Product of the Year 2020.
Her most recent bestseller, The Infinite Leader, won the International Press Award for the Best Book on Leadership for 2021. Her previous book, The Leadership Lab, was named Business Book of the Year and Best Book on Leadership in 2019 and won the International Press Award 2020 and the NYC Library Big Apple Award. She is also the author of: Geopolitics for Investors (2015) and Signals: How Everyday Signs Help Us Navigate the World’s Turbulent Economy a crowd-funded Amazon best-seller (2016/7).
She was named one of the Fifty Top Inspiring Women in the UK and one of the Top 100 in Tech by @WATC_WeAreTech and longlisted by Computer Weekly as a Most Influential Women in Tech for 2019, 2020 and 2021. She has a BA from Mount Vernon College and an M.Sc. and PhD from LSE. She completed the Harvard Program on National Security. She gave the graduation address at the London School of Economics in 2013 and 2016. Commercial firms like Google, Rolls Royce, American Express, major banks and asset managers like Citigroup and State Street, governments and military leaders retain her to speak.
As we enter the US Presidential election year, the world faces extraordinary geopolitical challenges. We are in a Hot War in Cold Places (the Arctic, space, and deep tech) and a Cold War in Hot Places (Africa, the Pacific) and not just in Ukraine.
Russia and China and the US seem to be on a collision path, though that may be a precursor to a deal. China and the US are racing to establish a base on the moon and infrastructure in space. Space based technology look set to deliver many solutions to Earth-bound problems including unlimited clean, green energy through space-based solar power, unlimited resources from asteroid mining and unlimited internet connectivity that will raise the value of every square inch on Earth. The reach for abundance could trigger either conflict or a peaceful resolution of geopolitics on Earth.
Meanwhile, the pace of technological innovation in all fields is increasing faster than our capacity to understand it, especially in AI. AI as more our friend than our enemy, after all, it’s a reflection of us. It will create a wave of new jobs as we see ever more abundance unfold. Dr. Malmgren has been a manufacturer of robotics, automation and AI-led software. She says the future lies in shardware which is when hardware and software combine to create value. The West is getting good at (s)hardware again but we have to open our imagination to the possibility of things like computer chips being manufactured in space and being directed into off- Earth manufacturing.
Dr. Malmgren explains the grand landscape of geopolitics that extend far beyond Ukraine and into tech including AI, life sciences and the space economy, which all mean that our practical and geopolitical problems can now be more easily addressed and resolved. The US Presidential election, she argues, will also be driven by technology. Bill Clinton came to office on the back of Saturday Night Live (playing the Sax) on TV. President Obama rode the Youtube wave. President Trump relied on Twitter. The next President will be a Podcast President, meaning there is going to be a reduced focus on sound bites, traditional media channels and a deeper focus on policy substance than we’ve seen in years. As usual, the US is likely to elect someone no one imagined possible three years before.Nobody ever heard of Clinton, Obama or imagined that GW Bush or Trump could win. After predicting Trump could win in 2016, at a time that this seemed impossible, Dr Malmgren now sees a fascinating new scenario that very much depends on geopolitics. Most of the key candidates are environmentalists and Bitcoin supporters. This will accelerate us into a different future.
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